The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

3.11 Dynamic Memory Allocation and the Heap Segment

Although static and automatic variables are all that simple programs may need, more sophisticated programs need the ability to allocate and deallocate storage dynamically (at runtime) under program control. In the C language, you would use the malloc and free functions for this purpose. C++ provides the new and delete operators. Pascal uses new and dispose. Other languages provide comparable facilities. These memory-allocation routines have a couple of things in common: They let the programmer request how many bytes of storage to allocate, they return a pointer to the newly allocated storage, and they provide a facility for returning the storage to the system so the system can reuse it in a future ...